A Conversation with Ronald Rael
Ronald Rael is a professor of architecture with a joint appointment in the Department of Architecture in the College of Environmental Design, and the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley. He co-founded the company Emerging Objects with architect Virginia San Fratello and is the author of Earth Architecture (2008), Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the US-Mexico Boundary (2017), and Printing Architecture: Innovative Recipes for 3-D Printing (2018). I spoke with Rael over the phone. Though he lives in California, at the time of the interview, he was in southern Colorado. It was October 2018, and he told me he was making a cup of hot chocolate.
Bryan Czibesz: Your appointment at UC Berkeley is in architecture but also includes environmental design and art practice; your work is obviously reflective of that, and vice versa. You work in material studies and craft disciplines, too. Can you talk a little bit about your research interests, your background, and how all these things come together in what you do?
Ronald Rael: Sure. Maybe I’ll contextualize it from my background, to start.
